The Los Angeles, California public school system is openly refusing to teach perhaps as many as 100,000 kids how to read. Educational bureaucrats are in a snit over the passage of Proposition 227, which requires that non-English-speaking students be taught English as rapidly as possible. Immersion, after all, works especially well with children. These bureaucrats, however, like the ineffectual, but budget-rich, bilingual method, so they have decreed that kids can’t be taught to read until they become fully fluent in English–which, they say, may take a couple of years.

The notion that youngsters can’t be taught reading in tandem with learning English is preposterous. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “A survey of numerous studies of learning to read in a second language, conducted at the University of North Carolina, found that children learn best using virtually the same methods–regardless of whether they are learning in their native language or a second tongue.” Yet instructors are prohibited from teaching these kids how to read in English. The Times gives an example: “Diane Solomon, a kindergarten teacher in Hollywood [says], ‘They told us we should concentrate on oral language and not even show [kids] the written language.”‘

Parents and elected officials should not give in to this crude, blackmailing attempt to undo Proposition 227, which voters overwhelmingly approved.

This situation underscores why we need school choice, making schools accountable to parents rather than to bureaucracies and unions. If a school were not doing the job, Mom could remove her child and place him in another school–public, private or parochial. Parents would no longer feel helpless.

Monopolies–in business or education–breed irresponsibility. After all, it was California that 11 years ago threw out the tried-and-true reading method known as phonics for a new, faddish method called whole language. California reading scores have since plunged to just about the worst in the nation.



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